Consider this project an eclectic mixtape, but rather with music, it’s focused around imagery. So what started off as drawing commonalities between the gradient background of a Genghis Khan portrait and an image from a 1996 Issey Miyake runway show began my project to juxtapose images that are not always necessarily similar in subjects, but have links in their coloring, shapes, and moods evoked. For me, a bulk of my inspirations and visions trace back to fashion; be it a SoundCloud discovery as a potential Balenciaga soundtrack, or a DMV line-up as an imagined setting for a shot by Mario Sorrenti for Vogue Nippon editorial. I wanted the worlds of my inspirations, be it art, fashion or music to become more interconnected than ever and to create possible mood-boards that my treasured visionaries may have used when creating the very works that are now an integral core of my aesthetic vision.

Artist Hrvoje Majer has time and time stated that his inspirations for his artwork come from fashion magazines, mainly editorials, as he closely references fashion photography and Western European paintings to open up the door for personal interpretations. His recreations of legendary pieces, like “High Camp” from a 1997 issue of W magazine don’t focus on who is in the photo as much as image or identity that the magazine is trying to sell. He interprets fashion editorials to allow for a projection of his own stories and story lines he creates, oftentimes isolating the identities of the subjects to reveal their “inner qualities.”

2) Inferno by Dario Argento (1980) x License to Drive by Greg Beeman (1988)
What do an Italian supernatural horror film and a teen adventure film have in common? Since it’s definitely not story line, it has to be cinematography. In Inferno (top), Dario Argento continually used atmospheric red, blue, and green-yellow background lighting to create cohesive visuals for a script that was thematically disjointed. Strictly atmosphere-wise, Greg Beeman’s choice of visuals were on the same technicolor continuum in License to Drive.

3) i-D (1998) x “Blissfully Yours” by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2002)
I decided to put this set together solely on the fact that each photo was a split-screen and I appreciated the high energy nature of the i-D magazine feature (1997) with a couple kissing on the top half and a baby being breast fed at the bottom juxtaposed with a serene still from Apichatpong Weerasethaku’s Blissfully Yours (2002).

4) Lili Sumner by Ryan Kelly (2013) x Scott Bromley and Robin Jacobsen (1982)
In 2013, the publication Oyster Travel did a special on New Zealander youth. One photo of a girl named Lili Sumner showed her leaning against a greenhouse surrounded by big leaved plants while wearing a mustard yellow shirt and bell bottom jeans. The relationship between her shirt and the surrounding wide leafed plants around her reminded me of a clipping from a 80’s interior magazine of an apartment shower turned indoor greenhouse by Scott Bromley and Robin Jacobsen.

5) Paz de la Huerta after the Golden Globes (2011) x Luis Sanchis for The Face (1998)
It’s rare that a candid paparazzi shot can mesh so well with an on-location magazine editorial–this is one of the cases.